ANDREW PIEPENBRINK
Artificial intelligence in edge computing has arrived. Recent months have seen the advent of a number of platforms for bringing AI and ML to embedded systems. These systems fit in the palm of your hand, and they are beginning to erode the trope of AI as a creature inhabiting some anonymous rack server flickering away in a data center. To paraphrase Mike Kuniavsky when he identified the stagnation of clock speeds in the early 2000s as heralding the era of ‘Peak MHz’, we now see the industry beginning to compete along different axes; support for massive AI/ML software stacks is the new chip cost, dedicated accelerators in silicon is the new energy efficiency. Here we see a creature of the sort this shift has spawned; the artist’s port of Tensorflow to a well-known and broadly-supported microcontroller system, the Teensy.